In an open letter, the students said they wanted their courses to delve into a wider range of economics theories and methodologies than the standard neo-classical model that dominates undergraduate teaching, and to learn more about the implications of policy-making.

Speaking to those students was a heartening experience – all of them struck me as extremely thoughtful and articulate. Their desire for reform seemed driven by a curiosity about the world and what economics could do to improve it.

I suspect they’ll be encouraged by comments made in a speech today by the similarly thoughtful and articulate Benoît Cœuré, who sits on the European Central Bank’s executive board.Read more

For those who have followed the scrap between Raghuram Rajan, governor of the Reserve Bank of India, and his counterparts at the European Central Bank and the Federal Reserve on the ill-effects of Fed tapering, Benoît Cœuré’s thoughtful speech today is worth a read.

In Mr Rajan’s view, the way the Fed conducts its monetary policy is irresponsible. The US central bank acts merely on the basis of national interest, with scant regard for the ramifications of mass dollar printing in a world where the dollar remains the dominant reserve currency.

These attacks have usually been parried with remarks that central banks such as the Fed (and, given its role as issuer of the only other real reserve currency, the ECB) have little choice but to act within the national interest given the scope of their mandates. From Mr Coeure’s boss Mario Draghi earlier this year:

Draghi:Mr Rajan is really an excellent economist. What one would have to demonstrate to speak of selfishness is the following. One would have to show that monetary policy actions within the United States, the ECB and so on were decided for reasons other than for the sake of the mandate and that, as a result, they were harmful to other countries. As I said, the priority for all of us is compliance with our mandate, which for us is maintaining price stability and for the Federal Reserve Board is the dual mandate.

Mr Cœuré’s speech is interesting as, while he does not go so far as to side with Mr Rajan, he is not so intellectually dishonest as to say that all is fine with the pre-crisis orthodoxy. In short, this said that if everyone just sticks to their inflation targeting mandate and flexible exchange rates everything will be just great. Read more

It appears that the ECB’s top brass are divided over whether or not the recent rise in Spanish bond yields is warranted.

Bloomberg on Wednesday attributed the following comments to ECB executive board member Benoît Coeuré:

European Central Bank Executive Board member Benoit Coeure suggested that the bank could revive its bond-purchase program to reduce Spain’s borrowing costs.

“Market conditions are not justified,” Coeuré said at an event in Paris today. “Will the ECB intervene? We have an instrument, the securities markets program, which hasn’t been used recently but it still exists.”…

…”We have a new government in Spain that has taken very strong deficit measures,” Coeuré said. “All this takes time. The political will is enormous.”

Mr Coeuré’s view that Madrid’s political will is “enormous” contrasts somewhat with comments made by his boss, ECB president Mario Draghi at last Wednesday’s presser, which suggested that market pressure was justified both by economic fundamentals and the Spanish government’s inaction. Read more

How far would the European Central Bank under Mario Draghi go in cutting interest rates?

The ECB president has taken care to rule out little in the way of possible steps were the eurozone crisis to deteriorate again. But Benoît Cœuré, the ECB’s new French executive board member, has hinted at one limit. In a speech delivered in the US a few days ago but just published on the ECB’s website, he warns of the potential costs of reducing interest rates to zero, or even pushing them into negative territory. Read more

A chink in the European Central Bank’s tough stance on bond buying? Benoît Coeuré, nominated by France to join the ECB executive board, told the European Parliament late on Monday that bond purchases might have to be stepped up. He thus went beyond the comments in his written evidence, which I wrote about in a previous post.

“If we feel there is a deterioration in terms of the transmission of monetary policy, then we should do more,” Mr Coeuré said, according to Reuters. Read more

Nicolas Sarkozy, France’s president, who strongly believes the ECB should be acting far more aggressively in combating the eurozone crisis, lobbied hard to have a compatriot on the European Central Bank’s executive board. Last month, a place finally became vacant when Lorenzo Bini Smaghi announced his departure for Harvard University.

Mr Sarkozy’s nominee to replace him, Benoît Coeuré, deputy director general and chief economist at the French treasury, has now outlined his views in written evidence submitted to the European Parliament.

Anyone hoping he would create a revolution at the ECB may be disappointed. On the main points of ECB policy, there appears little that would upset Frankfurt. Read more

Just what the eurozone did not need right now: another possible German-Franco row, this time over jobs at the European Central Bank. In Brussels late on Tuesday, Wolfgang Schäuble, German finance minister, pressed for his deputy Jörg Asmussen to take over the ECB’s economics department from Jürgen Stark when he joins the ECB’s six-man executive board at the start of 2012.

The problem is that France’s Benoit Coeuré, an academic economist as well as French civil servant, who will arrive at the ECB at the same time as Mr Asmussen, is arguably much better suited for the economics portfolio. Read more

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Chris Giles has been the economics editor of the Financial Times since 2004. Based in London, he writes about international economic trends and the British economy. Before reporting economics for the Financial Times, he wrote editorials for the paper, reported for the BBC, worked as a regulator of the broadcasting industry and undertook research for the Institute for Fiscal Studies. RSS

Claire Jones is the FT's Eurozone economy correspondent, based in Frankfurt. Prior to this, she was an economics reporter in London. Before joining the Financial Times, she was the editor of the Central Banking journal. Claire studied philosophy and economics at the London School of Economics. RSS

Robin Harding is the FT's US economics editor, based in Washington. Prior to this, he was based in Tokyo, covering the Bank of Japan and Japan's technology sector, and in London as an economics leader writer. Robin studied economics at Cambridge and has a masters in economics from Hitotsubashi University, where he was a Monbusho scholar. Before joining the FT, Robin worked in asset management and banking. RSS

Sarah O’Connor is the FT’s economics correspondent in London. Before that, she was a Lex writer, covered the US economy from Washington and the Icelandic banking collapse from Reykjavik. Sarah studied Social and Political Sciences at Cambridge University and joined the FT in 2007. RSS

Ferdinando Giugliano is the FT's global economy news editor, based in London. Ferdinando holds a doctorate in economics from Oxford University, where he was also a lecturer, and has worked as a consultant for the Bank of Italy, the Economist Intelligence Unit and Oxera. He joined the FT in 2011 as a leader writer. RSS

Emily Cadman is an economics reporter at the FT, based in London. Prior to this, she worked as a data journalist and was head of interactive news at the Financial Times. She joined the FT in 2010, after working as a web editor at a variety of news organisations.
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Ralph Atkins, capital markets editor, has been writing for the Financial Times for more than 20 years following an economics degree from Cambridge. From 2004 to 2012, Ralph was Frankfurt bureau chief, watching the European Central Bank and eurozone economies. He has also worked in Bonn, Berlin, Jerusalem and Brussels. RSS

Ben McLannahan covers markets and economics for the FT from Tokyo, and before that he wrote Lex notes from London and Hong Kong. He studied English at Cambridge University and joined the FT in 2007, after stints at the Economist Group and Institutional Investor. RSS